RE: Proposed Draft Charter for Choreography WG

Message
  I'm intrigued by Edwin's comment "BPML learned the hard way that the
notation language was a very important aspect of the usability and therefore
could not be an after thought."  Can someone elaborate on that and what
BPML's experience suggests to us?

Mike,

We never imagined that people would be sitting down and writing XML
documents to define their services and processes.

Out of the two possibilities we looked at, English (or any other human
readable language) and visual notation, we preferred the visual notation as
the more useable means to expressing processes, and so we started working on
Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) alongside with BPML.

BPMN provides the visual notation that talks to normal people at a language
they can understand, which is then transformed to BPML (or BPEL or WSCI, or
any other XML language) to produce a document that is applicable
specifically to the software that has to operate on it.

UML provides a good foundation for modeling, but as most vendors have found
out, it order to use it for the definition of processes that software can
operate on, one must put some constraints on these definitions and add
additional stereotypes. BPMN achieves just that. It starts with a familiar
visual notation, but describes the precise semantics that would allow a
piece of software to operate on that definition and provides transformations
to other XML languages.

I have forwarded this e-mail to Stephen White who chairs the BPMN working
group, so he can provide more detailed information.

You may want to take a look at the BPMN working group's Web site:
http://bpmi-notation-wg.netfirms.com/

arkin